The Independent National Electoral Commission has promised a better conduct in the forthcoming governorship and State Assembly election.
The commission assured that the glitches that occurred during the February 25 elections would not repeat themselves in Saturday’s election.
INEC Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, gave this assurance while speaking on Arise TV on Friday, stating that the commission had learnt valuable lessons from the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections.
Controversies have trailed the conduct of the February 25 elections, particularly, the presidential election, as INEC distributed electoral materials late on the election day, failed to upload results as early as possible during the presidential election, with the major opposition parties such as: the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour party kicking against the results that produced Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress as the President-elect.
Okoye said, “The commission is determined to improve on its previous performance. What we have done is to learn valuable lessons from previous elections that we conducted, and we’re going to put those lessons into our planning purposes and processes, and into our deployment purposes.
“As of today, what we’re having is what we call state assembly and governorship elections.
“In all the states of the federation, both the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines and all the sensitive election materials have left the Central Bank and the various state offices of the federation.
“We want to ensure that all polling units open on time. Secondly, we made sure that we reconfigured all the BVAS that will be used for this particular election in terms of making sure that the BVAS perform optimally and also making sure that some of the challenges we had in the previous elections do not reoccur.”
He added that INEC had also given refresher training to all categories of staff that would be involved in the elections.
He said the country would be having 28 governorship elections and 993 state assembly constituency elections, saying “It’s a huge election and INEC will be paying very close attention to what is going on in the various states.”
